Norman Mailer: Trending quotes

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Norman Mailer: 330 quotes7 likes

“This is D. J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam.”

D.J., in Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) Ch. 10

“When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.”

On Tough Guys Don't Dance as quoted in The New York Times (8 June 1984)

“Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.”

Norman Mailer book The Executioner's Song

The Executioner's Song (1979)

“At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Sixth Presidential Paper — A Kennedy Miscellany : An Impolite Interview
The Presidential Papers (1963)

“It might be more difficult to be a President than it ever had before. Nothing less than greatness would do.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3858/superman-supermarket/ (November 1960) <br class="br">Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“Politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people, that our politics still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen, rather than having descended to us from the chill punctilio of aristocratic negotiation.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person … They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.”

Norman Mailer

Kittredge Gardiner, in Harlot's Ghost : A Novel (1991)

“What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other — where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.”

Norman Mailer

Interview for French TV (1998)

“West of the Amphitheatre, railroad sidings seemed to continue on for miles, accompanied by those same massive low sheds larger than armories, with pens for tens of thousands of frantic beasts, cattle, sheep, and pigs, animals in an orgy of gorging and dropping and waiting and smelling blood. In the slaughterhouses, during the day, a carnage worthy of the Disasters of War took place each morning and afternoon.”

Norman Mailer book Miami and the Siege of Chicago

Pt. 2, p. 86
Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968)

“However could he organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks Sam, too scattered.”

Norman Mailer

Source: The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956), Ch. 5

“Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march.”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

Pt. 3, Ch. 10
The Naked and the Dead (1948)

“I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity — it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 5
An American Dream (1965)

“Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.”

Norman Mailer

News summaries (31 December 1969)

“Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.”

Norman Mailer book An American Dream

Stephen Rojack, in Ch. 7
An American Dream (1965)

“Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“The highest prize in a world of men is the most beautiful woman available on your arm and living there in her heart loyal to you.”

Norman Mailer

On Joe DiMaggio's marriage to Marilyn Monroe, in Marilyn (1973)

“Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work. … In this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles.”

Norman Mailer

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

“We think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America. Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.”

Norman Mailer

Marilyn (1973), Ch. 1

“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."… The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea…. Hot dog!”

Norman Mailer book The Naked and the Dead

On Maj. Dalleson, in Pt. 4, Ch. 1
The Naked and the Dead (1948)

“There was that law of life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 26